Mario Fux

Ok. I’m actually almost there already . But I hope you are ready to go there and you got all the emails (some people told me that the mails landed in their spam folders). Look at the kde-events archive if you’re unsure.

If you come by plane you should have received an additional email with details about the train ticket from the airport to Randa. If you didn’t get this email or still need such a ticket contact me asap (fux at the KDE servers). This is the last chance!

There is a sprint page on the community wiki where we collect information about this year’s meeting. Thus if you blog before, during or after the meeting please add your post to the community wiki page. Do the same with the picture collections you take in Randa or on the way there or back .

And here is something you can use in your blog posts about the Randa 2011 meeting. Some banners done by the first year informatics trainees of the vocational school Visp (Valais/Switzerland):

Oh and btw the above mentioned sprint page is the black or information board for important information during the sprint. Read you next as I’d like to report you about our work of the last weekend: wiring the house in Randa and thus taking the house apart .

First I’d like to thank David Vignoni for his work on the logo for the Randa meeting. It’s the basis for the work of the young informatic trainees. But the results are still secret (as even I haven’t seen anything myself but get the first results at the end of this week .

And now to the ideas and proposals (btw this has nothing in common with the GSoC ideas of KDE!). As you probably or hopefully already know the KDE Nepomuk team will have a meeting in Randa this June (from the 1st to the 7th of this month) and we still want application developers to integrate this technology in their application or to work on some interesting and great new ideas. And there will be really good help as Sebastian Trüg will be in Randa and he is going to do one or the other workshop of Nepomuk basics. And here are some ideas and thoughts of mine to start your imagination engines:

• The KDE semantic clipboard. There is some code in the old subversion playground of KDE and in December 2010 I wrote a paper about this topic. In short, this clipboard enhances to normal one with the capability of knowing what (in the context of meaning) it copy-and-pastes. This clipboard does not just copy numbers and formatting but addresses, geographic coordinates or blbliographic references. Take a look and bring it to a releasable state. There are even some solution proposals in the above mentioned paper.
• All of the new KDE PIM application use Nepomuk technology through their Akonadi interactions.
• Digikam had (or has?) some capabilities to exchange its information and metadata with the Nepomuk storage. What about tagging your pictures with the contacts (and PIMO::Persons) of the new Kaddressbook and projects which are then usable system wide.
• And Amarok had (or again has?) some functions to share it’s music database with Nepomuk and thus make it system wide and not just enclosed in one applicatition.
• But there are as well good examples for existing Nepomuk integration: Bangarang. A multimedia player which remembers what you like, what music and videos you have on your system and where is more information about this media data (in the web).
• Another idea could be a (scientific) paper or article collector which understands the connections (or quotations) between the articles and that the strings at the top (authors) are actually persons and the references at the end of the articles are actually links and thus relations to other papers and articles. Take a look at the SWRC ontology.
• Yet another project which extensively uses Nepomuk is the new KDE Telepathy framework. They don’t just invent yet another represenation of a person and its contacts but use PIMO::Person and thus make connections to them system wide comprehensible and reusable.
• And let’s not forget the Plasma framework and its activities. But there is more and better information about this on the site of ivan Cukic.
• Or something completely new. An ontology for TV series, recordings and shows… (Update: Sebastian told me that there is already one: NMM. And Bangarang and some other applications use it.)
• And there is Zeitgeist and QtZeitgeist…

Enough ideas? And last but not at all least and I almost forgot it: two ideas for plasmoids (and corresponding dataengines).

• A person plasmoid which shows all files, documents, addresses, persons, music, pictures, etc. related to this person and if you drag and drop something to this plasmoid the things get related (and not tagged with the string of this person’s name (and if you don’t know yet the important difference, please ask as I seem to be a bad teacher and explainer then)). Imagine something like a plasmoid with the name and picture of the person and in the config some checkboxes for all related resources (documents, audio files, persons, etc.) which should be displayed in the plasmoid.
• There is actually no second idea but an almost infinite number: more plasmoids (and dataengines) for other resources like projects, geographic locations (imagine a radar like plasmoid with resources depending on their proximity.)

I think these are some ideas and possible projects. As we want to send the e.V. board an estimated budget for Randa 2011 meeting we’d like to close the registration at the end of the this week.

And here are some more news about sponsoring and Randa 2011:

• 200.00 CHF by a private person.
• 500.00 CHF reducation for house renting (and thus another 500.00 CHF less for the e.V. budget).

If you have other or more ideas don’t hesitate to talk with us and do this live at the Randa 2011 meeting! For further questions just come to our mailing list.

Morning dear readers. It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m sitting in the train from Valais, Switzerland to Bern back home. There is already some text written for this blog post but my (one of them plan for this one-hour-journey is it to clean it up and bring it in a publishable form and push the submit button when I’m at home. So what happened the last week?

On Wednesday I filmed another presentation of Prof. Petko at the university of Zurich (last time I filmed a presentation of him about "serious games"). The presentation was about ICT (information and communication technologies) in school and education and it was interesting to listen to him talking about Equador (right?) and Portugal where there is one PC per child which is not yet reached (or even targeted) in the oh-so-rich Switzerland. Somehow embarassing and somehow understandable if you know about the fear of technology in this area of the world. But you know which systems run on the PCs in Equador or Portugal? No? Ever heard about OLPC, Linux, KDE and Free Software?

But now to the four todo items I listed in my last blog post and thus to the first miss.

Instead of NLP and Sonnet code reading I did some QML and QtQuick learning and hacking. The screenshots below shows my playground to learn QML. It’s a prototype or rebuild of a bus stop information board. Not coincidentally it shows the train stops you pass when you arrive at the Zurich airport and want to go to Randa by train. I hope or try to extend this further to a plasma based information board for different stuff. We have a lot of great data sources ("dataengines" and "services" in Plasma speech) and for the public transportation stop display I’ll try to use the public transport dataengine by Friedrich Karl Tilman Pülz (if you read this is there any official release coming?). If it’s better to develop a new Plasma containment or if an applet or plasmoid is enough needs to be discussed with the Plasma professionals .

My second todo item was it to further continue my KDE development enviroment and as a newer llibdbusmenu-qt-dev package arrived finally in Debian sid I succeeded here . But now there is another new problem. The software doesn’t find the Oxygen icons. Another todo item was further work on the registration form for the Randa 2011 which I hope to finish tomorrow or the day after. Concerning Randa I’m in contact with two teachers of the local vocational school (both of them or participants of my Linux course) about a possible meeting of their pupils and the KDE guys in Randa. The two guys teach informatics and electro techniques at this school. And this btw wipes off my last todo items as yesterday I did another lecture (or three of my current Linux course.

And before I list my KDE work items for the next week here are some random thoughts of the last week:

• KMyMoney is a really great financial tool with great documentation. Take a look if not yet done.
• The Calligra Stage GSoC idea about a plasma presentation widget would be perfect for my planned Plasma Information Board (PIB?;-).

Todo for the coming week:

• Read Sonnet code and write one or two concepts for my NLP and CL (computational linguistics) projects.
• Finish the registration form for the Randa 2011 meeting.
• Bring some Oxygen into my KDE development enviroment .
• Further working and playing with QML.
• Finish the German translation of the KDE Booklet (if there is no more help I need to convince B. to help me as he has holidays .

BTW I see your flattring as some mean of voting as well. The more one of my posts get flattred the more you seem to like it and the more I should work on this particular work.

The distance between two of my KDE work day reports each week get’s a bit bigger but I think it’s still quite regular and I’ll do my best to bring it back on track. Thanks to all the people who flattr me (the FSFE wordpress software got a flattr plugin now and thanks to all the people who "just" read my blog. An idea for next year is to provide other facilities to donate and probably even to vote on what you prefer me to work .

This week I’ve done some personal work on two of the KDE wikis. On techbase I inserted a first very (very) raw draft for a collection of KDE software configuration files and directories and data storage files and directories. I’ll start with the apps I use myself most often. Actually I don’t know if it’s possible to edit one other user’s personal page on the wikis but later I’d like to move this part of my personal page anyway to a better place. By the way underneath there you still find an attempt to collect the release dates (past and future) of different GNU/Linux distributions.

Some more work went into the personal page on the KDE community wiki: There I collect information about free (as in speech) NLP tools. NLP stands for natural language processing and programming and consists of almost everything that brings natural languages and computer together. This page is work in progress and thus will change a lot before it get’s excluded from the personal page area. But here fits the same as with the other page: If it’s possible to edit it and you’ve some good information to add do so, please! Additionally you find there some NLP stuff already in and around KDE.

And then there is something that happened last week which makes me quite proud and I’d like to share with you. There is even some connection to KDE . In one of my last blog post I wrote about a paper I had to hand in about the "KDE semantic clipboard". It got accepted and last week on Thursday I had an oral test about it (actually something similar to my last exam for my minor computer sciences). And you know what? Best mark! A 6.0 here in Switzerland and the professor and my advisor told me that this work and exam appears to be one of a major student. Great… I couldn’t resist to ask if there is a possibility to do a doctoral thesis when I’ve finished my studies and they once again said yes .

But I’m not yet sure if I want and will do a doctoral thesis afterwards. First I still need to write my diploma thesis in education which needs a lot of motivation as my major topic (education) isn’t that interesting for me anymore.

I try to keep the rest of this blog post as short as possible. The work on the morphological API for KDE (and thus Sonnet) goes on, if you’re interested in helping (or lurking) in the organization of the next Randa meeting subscribe to the kde-events mailing list till tomorrow or the day after and I joined the game as well.

And the last thing for this time the promised english language learning links:

• Advanced English Lessons: http://www.englishpage.com/ (good exercises collection)
• Baccalaureate Exam Tricks: http://english.errachidia.org/
• English Grammar Online: http://www.ego4u.com/
• Englisch Hilfen: http://www.englisch-hilfen.de/ (German)
• English The Easy Way: http://www.english-the-easy-way.com
• Learn English Free Online: http://www.learnenglish.de/ (German)
• Grammar diagnostic test: http://english-grammar.webpark.pl/diagnostic_grammar_1.htm

The half vegatarian half carnivore pizza is in the oven and before the TV show about some Wikileaks background story starts I’ve some minutes to start writing my blog entry about "serious games", a very interesting presentation I visited yesterday, and some other KDE stuff.

As it’s part of my job to sometimes record guest presentations at or of our institute (of education) yesterday I had the possibility to visit a presentation about "serious games". The presenter was a former teacher of mine (now professor) who taught me a lot about education and media. "Serious games" is a concept about computer games with an educational and teaching background. The audience consisted almost exclusively of women (female human beings are the majority in the educational sciences and business in Switzerland). Unfortunately the prejudices about the anti-social character of gamers and a causal relation between players of violent games and violent acts are still alive. This even though there is no study which underpins these ideas and some studies exist that show even the opposite of the former.

The presentation was very interesting and entertaining and I hope to take some ideas for my diploma thesis. At the end the presenter showed some interesting free (probably not as in speech) browser games with a "serious" background. I hope to post some of them in the next days when I’m finished with cutting and uploading of the taken recording. And by the way: our institute provides a nice video portal about school lessons in different languages. Not all are free to watch and the website is still only in German but useful and interesting nonetheless (and finally works on Linux (with Flash ;-( as well).

On another thing today I got my svn-soon-git KDE developer account and a batch of KDE business cards was in B’s and my postbox.

Oh and yesterday I got my english grammar test back. A better mark than I expected. And if there is some intereste I would post the links I collected during this course to leverage my english. So are you interested in english grammar exercises and grammar rules?

It’s quite some time since I last blogged. I wanted to report every week about my KDE work day: one day dedicated only to KDE, be it development, research, documentation. Unfortunately I didn’t succeed in reporting about it. But I more or less managed to work one day each week for my KDE skills.

Normally it wasn’t a whole day just for this but several hours during the week and mostly all hours summed up to more than a day. So there is and was a lot going on.

I did a lot of work on my Qt skills. Tried several things about linguistic stuff like stemming, part of speech tagging. Most of the stuff not really worth publishing. And there is other stuff. Stuff not yet ready to talk about in the public. But hopefully soon.

And there was and is this Qt and KDE programming course in my local LUG: We’re still on it and the number of participants grows!

And even Konqi and his tale are alive. In my brain. There will be another story but I don’t know when and I don’t know when I’ll tell you more about this two bigger projects. But I will. I just wanted to let you know that I’m still alive and coding, reading, organizing, thinking, brainstorming, talking, discussing, ….

Oh and almost forgot this: I’m now since 6 weeks in the English Grammar foundation course. Do you see a difference ?

So good morning dear readers. It took a long time for this new and next entry of mine about my kde work days. But I’ve an excuse. I moved – and the new and better internet connection starts to work from the 19th of August. Till then I’m online only when I’m in the office and on some swiss train stations occasionally. It’s now more than two or three weeks since the last entry and I want to start right on about some stuff I did or tried.

Last Friday I started a serie of programming courses at my local LUG (the LUGO – Linux User Group Oberwallis). I’m not yet good in developing with Qt and KDE but I tought that I could give and share my new knowledge with some other LUG mates as I go on. And we already were a group of four people increasing in the next course. There are some spare notes and nine slides of a short presentation. Probably I still write some text of what I told them. But the course shall and will be quite interactive as we are all on different knowledge. So if and when you’re in Switzerland and speak German visit us. The next course is on Friday, the 10th of September 2010. Oh and btw. This Friday, the 13th of August, we have another general meeting at our LUG with some presentations about Linux on different devices (and of course a short presentation by me about KDE mobile) and somehow an integrated release party for KDE SC 4.5.0.

Then I read and tried some of the git stuff in the last weeks. As the projects grow (more than one file) and version control system begins to make sense and which could be better suited than git (no flame war about vcs please – I’ve choosen git because Qt already switched to it and KDE will finally switch to it in the next months). So here is a short summary and listing of some git commands:

• "man git-log" or "git help log" to get information about the git log command
• "git init" in a directory to create and initialize a new git respository
• "git add ." to add the current directory to the cache (index) and
• "git commit" to finally commit it
• "git commit -a" to commit all new changes without explicitely adding them
• "git diff –cached" to see the changes and
• "git log", "git log -p" or "git log –stat –summary" to view the history
• "git branch <newBranch>" creates a new branch and
• "git merge <newBranch>" merges it with the master branch (what a surprise
• "git clone <localOrRemoteUrl> <newName>" clones another repository
• "git pull <otherRepo> master" merges the changes of the otherRepo with your master and
• "git fetch <otherRepo> master" does the same without merging
• "gitk" is a graphical history and diff browser for git

All the stuff I read or learned is from the gittutorial and git documentation (aptitude install git-doc on a Debian system .

As you probably already noticed I’m somehow interested in semantic and natural language stuff. Some months ago I asked some friends of mine to send me five to ten (5-10) sentences in natural (human) language about searches they want to do on their computers. Something like: "show me all the text documents I worked on last week and tagged with ‘project X’". So here is a wish to you or job for you: Send me some such natural language query (english or german, probably some french once, that’s all I speak and understand , preferably from collegues or friends who are not power users but normal computer users. I want to analyse them and try something out.

As this blog entry is already longer than expected I want to add some information about myself. You should now my name and that I like (or love?;-) free software and thus KDE. I’m 31 years old, life in Switzerland (grew up in the south of it and life now somewhere in the middle (who knows where and read the last entry?;-). Eleven years ago I finished my schooling as a primary school teacher but decided to study which I hope to finish in the spring of 2012. My major at the university is education and social education and the minors are computer sciences (with a special interest in AI and semantic web engineering) and computational linguistics.

And to end this entry. There is a new Qt technology coming up about the semantic web and desktop: QtSparql… (but Soprano is worth a look as well to say the least) and soon you’ll find here more information about Konqi the dragon…

I’d like to tell you a secret of why in fact I organized the KDE multimedia meeting. It was completely egoistic. I just wanted stable versions of my preferred multimedia software. And the success is finally arriving. On the 31st of May Christoph Pfister released the long awaited 1.0 version of Kaffeine for KDE 4. Thx a lot for this. And k3b‘s Michał Małek released the 2.0 stable version some days ago as well. Thx a lot!

But this was just an introduction and not really the main topic of this blog post. It’s about some statistics of the meeting. I did a questionnaire, which you can find here in pdf form. And 25 people completed it. The day before yesterday (when I started writing this blog post some weeks ago I put all the ratings, remarks and data into rkward (a KDE tool for statistics) but today they all disappeared . I don’t want to blame rkward because it’s becoming a really great tool worth a look! Fortunately there were some plots but the rest was undiscoverable. Today I recollected the data in OpenOffice.org-Calc and here are the results of the Swiss jury (yes, I like the Eurovision Song Contest .

The questionnaire consisted of a part about the person (sex, age, first time in Switzerland and group), a rating part and two last questions about the idea of another KDE group which could come to Randa and if they want to come back themselves. But first some general information about the meeting and the location.

We had 45 persons there which means developers, artists, organizers, bug fixers, etc. The house has a capacity of up to 100 people with something like 20 single rooms, 6 group bed rooms, 4 group rooms, one big group room under the roof, a chapel, two dining rooms, a club room, a chief office, 4 restrooms, a kitchen and some other infrastructural rooms. And there is a BBQ place outside surounded by a big green field.

Randa is located at approximately 1440 meters above sea level. We did a trip to Zermatt (1600 above sea level and 12 km away) walking back to Randa. And some of us even went up to the top of the Klein Matterhorn which is at 3883 meters above sea level.

From the 45 participants where 10 female and from the 25 questionnaire fillers were 6 female. In the picture below you see the age distribution.

We served almost 500 meals during the 5 days (thanks a lot to the cook Hadrien Eggs who was on holiday and cooked for us the whole week) and spent 15 EUR or 10 CHF for the food and drinks (excluding beer per person per day. The alcohol drinkers at the meeting (i don’t drink any) emptied 360 bottles of FreeBeer. The network helpers (thx Oliver Summermatter and Co) distributed several dozens of network cables and 6 or something wifi accesspoints.

We had more the 150 guest-nights in the house. And I hope (and think, because of the fresh mountain air most of the people slept well even tough the wooden floor of the old house was sometimes quite noisy (btw I slept in my families chalet nearby where the plasma meeting Tokamak3 happened . But now back to the questionnaire and its results:

As 6 people are female who completed the questionnaire there must be 18 male people who completed it as well (one was missing . Of the 25 people 11 were already in Switzerland and for 14 it was the first time. The average age was 29 years. The group distribution shows 8 people from amarok, 10 from the kdeedu team, 1 from the games team and the remaining 5 ticked off “multimedia general (other)”. Now to the rating questions where I always indicate the average rating (scale: 0 = not good, 1= could be better, 2 = good and 3 = very good).

1. Accommodation: Bedrooms: 2.32
2. Accommodation: Group and meeting rooms: 2.417
3. Location (house) in general: 2.6
4. Location (area, geographically): 2.8
5. Food (Breakfast, lunch & dinner): 2.917
6. Transport/travelling to the meeting: 2.375
7. Infrastructure: Power: 2.28
8. Infrastructure: Network (cable): 2.318
9. Infrastructure: Network (wireless): 1.76
10. Information about the meeting beforehand: 2.36
11. Organization staff friendliness: 2.96
12. Organization staff competence: 3

So as you see most of the items are between “good” and “very good” except of the item about the wifi. As I heard and experienced wifi is always a bad point at conferences but nonetheless we’ll do better next year. And yes there’ll be probably a next years meeting. More information to come…

On the proposal and remarks site of the questionnaire we got some valuable information: “real coffee” was missing, we need a “more formal registration system” next year and the house was sometimes noisy where we can’t fix a lot unfortunately. In the last question I asked if the people know of another KDE group which should have a meeting in Randa and the answers where between “yes”, “no” and “Nepomuk (the same and all the others” . All want to come back to Randa, nobody ticked off “no” .

And to end this post and staying somehow in the row of all the other posts here on the planet: I’m not going to Akademy. But if everything worked out fine I’ve a proxy there for my vote at the KDE e.V. agm. And I’ll read and watch everything that happens over there so write and capture a lot!

Oh an btw: I begin to love Blogilo! What a nice piece of furniture …ah… software.

In less than a month several KDE people will meet in the middle of the european Alpes in a small village called Randa, Switzerland. And the most important question atm is: Did you already order your plane or train tickets?

..oO(Meeting dates: Thursday, the 20th of May till Tuesday, the 25th of May 2010)

You’ve done it? Great and now prepare your laptop, install the current KDE trunk version, write down some todo items and pack your luggage.

If and when you’ve questions, now or during the meeting: mario AT unormal PUNTO org or +41787684260 (my mobile number, save it!

And now a call for a logo (thx annma for the idea). As this is already the second KDE meeting in the Alpes it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a logo. What about something with a K, multimedia stuff and some mountains or something completely different? Please sent your proposals to the email address above.

Here is the link to the meeting wiki page: http://community.kde.org/Multimedia/Sprint2010

More information in the next entry… CU and good weekend…

As I already shortly talked about in my last blog (btw: Jara is not with me anymore but that’s another story) there will be another KDE sprint in Randa, Switzerland. The date will be during May 2010 (the exact dates will follow next week) and the place at the House Randa.

If you have any relation to multimedia in KDE (audio, video, players, metadata, ideas or proposals) please add yourself to the doodle survey (your name together with your project). Especially if you are a Nokia/Qt person and have any relation with Phonon or Qt Multimedia please add yourself asap.

Until now the following projects are informed about the doodle survey:

• Amarok
• KDE multimedia
• KDE education
• KDE games
• Kaffeine
• Bangarang
• K3b
• Plasma Media Center
• Nepomuk

Which projects are missing?

If (yes, another “if” you are a Swiss person and would like to help please leave a comment or send me an email. This was the last “if” for this time.